A few months ago I blogged about how to create your own custom Cisco UCS ESXi 5 U1 installation media, with the latest security patches and drivers. There was also an ISO image on VMware's web site, which magically disappeared for a while. Well, now it appears to be back....
If you have the pleasure of working with a Cisco UCS server farm, you know ease of which you can upgrade firmware. A few days ago Cisco released the 2.0(3c) version of their UCS software. This is a minor release which fixes a few specific bugs. If you won't run...
When configuring a cluster in vSphere, one of the options that you should always configure is the VMware EVC mode. What is VMware EVC mode? It's the Enhanced vMotion Compatibility setting, which enables vMotion across multiple generations of processors. New processors often come with new instruction sets, and if the...
HP has released a new version (2012.08.0)Â of their "HP Service Pack for ProLiant", a Sept 2012 revision. For those of you unfamiliar with their packaging changes, this is a consolidated bootable ISO that does both offline and online firmware/driver updates. It really simplifies the updating of HP firmware on ProLiant...
O'Reilly Media has released a free eBook version of their "Introducing Windows Server 2012" book. I quickly flipped through the beta version, and found it quite informative. There are so many new features, literally hundreds, in Windows Server 2012 that this is a must read for anyone going to use...
Speaker: Chad Sakac, Vaughn StewartThis was a really great session! Had two of the best sessions on the last day of VMworld. Each protocol has different configuration considerations Majority of customers use block protocols (iSCSI, FC, FCoE) NetApp: NFS 50% usage, block the other 50% from autosupport data Best flexibility...
Speakers: Michael Cory, Jeff SzastakThis session was by far the best this week! 160 slides in 60 minutes, packed to the gills with actionable information on properly virtualizing your SQL server. In short, there's no reason why you can't virtualize SQL and have it meet business performance requirements. 80% of SQL performance...
This was a panel discussion going over the history of the vSphere hardening guides, current state, some common issues, and future direction for ensuring compliance with regulations such as HIPPA, PCI, DoD STIGs, etc. Upshot is that VMware really listened to customers with there vSphere 5.0 hardening guide and it's...
This session was extremely technical and went over the inner workflows of HA. For a better and more in-depth details, I would strongly suggest getting the VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book. HA protects against three failure modes: Host/VM failures; host network isolated and datastore PDL; Guest OS hangs and...
Speakers: Davi Ottenheimer, Matthew Wallace. Book: Securing your Virtual EnvironmentThis session was an overview of security considerations you need to keep in mind when virtualizing your environment. In fact, most of the recommendations apply to physical IT systems as well. The speaker went through the 10 chapters of their book...
Speaker: Pete BooneThis session covered various aspects of a virtualized infrastructure that need to be looked at when optimizing performance. The basic four food groups are memory, CPU, network, and storage. Benchmarking and Tools Consistent and reproducible results Important to have a baseline of acceptable performance Determine baseline of performance...
Speakers: Josh Gray, Jeff HunterThis was a great session for real-world HA tips and tricks of the trade. Everyone should be using vSphere HA, so theh tips apply to everyone. For more information check out the most excellent vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book by Duncan and Frank. Recent Enhancements in...